Earlier this month, scientists announced that humanity has entered its first major “tipping point,” in which the Earth system is dramatically transformed, often permanently. as warm water corals die en masse due to the steady increase in temperature. Think of events like falling off a cliff: there is no way back to the edge and the impact will be terrible.
Despite the attention these catastrophic milestones receive from scientists and the media (and rightfully so), less discussed is the fact that they also work in the other direction. Positive game-changers can occur on a wide range of scales, from a community garden helping neighbors eat healthier to a global energy system transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy. An individual may even achieve one, for example, if he decides to walk more and more instead of driving.
People can influence communities, communities can influence cities, and cities can influence nations. Thus, these critical moments can spread like an infection – in a good way. “It's rather the mirror opposite of the devastating Earth system tipping points that we desperately want to prevent,” said Steve Smith, a researcher at the University of Exeter's Institute for Global Systems, who is studying how to encourage this phenomenon. “Because positive inflection points are the changes we really need to push.”
What makes environmental tipping points so insidious is that they perpetuate themselves as threats intensify other threats—in the case of corals, high temperatures combined with ocean acidification and marine pollution. Fortunately, their happier counterparts also accelerate through their own momentum and feedback loops as benefits beget other benefits. For example, cities can encourage the adoption of green technologies such as electric vehicles in a variety of ways, according to new report from C40a global network of mayors fighting the climate crisis. “You can move quite quickly at the moment because of the widespread availability of these technologies,” said Cassie Sutherland, managing director of climate solutions and networks at C40. “You can actually make—with some sort of targeted intervention—very significant and widespread change.”
Using both carrots and sticks, policymakers can use these social and technological systems to achieve success. In simple terms, “pull” policies make sustainable technology more accessible, affordable, or attractive by using incentives such as tax credits to attract people to it. In fact, it is carrots made of money that can create irresistible market momentum. A stick, by contrast, is a “nudge” policy that, say, makes fossil fuel technologies more expensive, less convenient, or unaffordable, such as banning new natural gas connections in buildings. Push and pull policies are not mutually exclusive, and policymakers can use them together to achieve maximum effect.
Cities are uniquely positioned to do this kind of work, Sutherland said. Globally, they are home to more than half the world's population (and growing rapidly) but are responsible for 70 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. But they are also much more nimble than national governments as they set building energy efficiency standards, manage public transport systems and pursue their own emissions reduction targets overall. In contrast, the US government is now actively hostile to climate action, so that's okay. cities to increase your ambitions. “These are crucibles, test beds that can go further, faster and, in particular, go first,” Sutherland said.
Municipalities, for example, have the opportunity to adopt—and ideally drive to a tipping point—one of the most powerful climate solutions: the e-bike. Pedal instead of driving reduces greenhouse gas emissionsreduces urban congestion and improves public health through both additional exercise and reduced air pollution. (E-bikes also require less effort for people who may have difficulty riding a traditional two-wheeler.) In a given city, an active group of dedicated cyclists may begin to advocate for basic infrastructure such as dedicated lanes. “Cycling has a big positive feedback effect,” said Cameron Roberts, a sociologist at Carleton University in Canada, who studies active mobility. “Once they start getting victories, it will lead to better traffic rules, better infrastructure, which will lead to more cyclists, which will then snowball.” The data backs it up: bike commuting in Washington, D.C. and New York City. doubled in four yearspartly due to improved infrastructure.
That doesn't mean cities can't also encourage the switch from gasoline to electric vehicles, as Oslo, Norway, has done at extraordinary speed: In just the past decade, the market share of new electric vehicle sales has risen from 13.6 percent to 95.8 percent, the C40 report notes. (Ironically, Norway is one of the largest exporters of fossil fuels.) This happened because the government provided financial incentives, thereby making electric cars more affordable, and then mandated that all new cars be sold as zero-emissions by 2025. (Cities can do this with public transport, too: Mexico City, for example, gave gas bus operators an eight-year guarantee that, starting in 2025, they would only buy electric versions.) Oslo then added a sweetener to the mix by expanding its charging infrastructure, thus making it more convenient to own an electric car. “It’s the cities that have a lot of control over those parts that make it affordable and attractive,” Sutherland said.
Oslo did the same with heat pumps, which are now in 63 percent of Norwegian households. Instead of burning fossil fuels, these electrical appliances extract heat even from cold air and pump it indoors, then reverse it in the summer to cool the room, pushing the heat inside the room outside. To encourage their adoption, Norway introduced a carbon tax on heating fuels, making it increasingly expensive to switch away from all-electric energy, and provided financial incentives for the switch. Oslo again used its own subsidies, simplified the permitting process for installing devices, and introduced stricter energy efficiency standards for buildings. (In the US, market share is also growing as heat pumps now sells better than gas ovens. The states also formed a coalition accelerate adoption.)
Policymakers can also push new technologies to the tipping point. For example, last year in Framingham, Massachusetts, Eversource Energy The country's first networked geothermal district was put into operation controlled by the utility. The technology also uses heat pumps, which use fluid flowing through a network of underground pipes to cool and heat homes. Other states and cities could encourage more projects like this by taking a stick approach, such as banning natural gas in new buildings and continuing to pressure utilities to switch away from fossil fuels to cleaner technologies. With a carrot, they could provide financial incentives for communities to switch to grid-connected geothermal energy, which remains expensive.
Thinking more broadly, various parts of the global energy system must transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources. While oil and gas are a stagnant technology, renewables benefit from “economies of scale” and “learning by doing,” meaning the more you produce something, the cheaper and better it gets. Accordingly, prices for solar panels have fallen. more than 99 percent since the 1970s. The wind energy explosion also brought the UK past a tipping point as it quickly moved away from coal, helped by the country's introduction of a carbon price. “The price of coal became uncompetitive and uneconomical pretty quickly, to the point where the last coal-fired generator went offline last year,” Smith said.
The rapid development and adoption of renewable energy, Smith added, is largely due to a “cascade of positive changes” made possible by batteries, which are getting better and cheaper year after year. This has created a domino effect that is driving all kinds of sectors: electric vehicles and trainshome energy storage and grid that uses huge batteries to store solar and wind energy when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Utilities are also experimenting with vehicle-to-grid technology, in which electric vehicles simultaneously consume electricity and send it back to the system. provision of an extensive backup power supply network for further acceleration decarbonization. These intertwined market forces behind renewables and batteries are so powerful that the Trump administration we can only hope to slow down the green energy revolution in the US, there's no stopping it.
But cities and countries can't simply encourage positive inflections and call it a day — it must come alongside urgent cuts to the pollutants that cause warming in the first place, said Kiff Gallagher, a climate strategist and founding executive director of the Global Heat Reduction Initiative. All the attention is on carbon dioxide, but humanity can reduce warming dramatically and quickly by tackling “super pollutants.” greenhouse gases which are tens, hundreds and even thousands of times more powerful than CO2.
For example, food waste rotting in landfills as well as fossil fuel infrastructure create clouds methanewhich is 80 times more powerful, but disappears from the atmosphere much faster. (Agricultural waste, such as corn stalks, is also often left to rot, so more and more farmers are turning it into biocharIronically, heat pumps are essential to the transition away from fossil fuels, but the common refrigerant that allows them to work their magic is 2,000 times more powerful than CO2. So the industry moving towards more sustainable alternativeseven using CO2 itself as a refrigerant because it won't cause that much damage in the unlikely event of a leak. “These short-lived climate pollutants are responsible for nearly 50 percent of warming, but they currently receive only 5 percent of the climate funding aimed at combating them directly,” Gallagher said. “So this could be a tremendous impact point for the world.”
Thus, tipping points are both an environmental curse that we desperately need to avoid and a critical phenomenon that we need to harness to keep more of the Earth's systems from upending. Individual sectors can positively impact other aspects of the clean energy economy, one momentum at a time. “Once these tipping points are reached,” Sutherland said, “and a positive feedback loop occurs, you will begin to see other elements of the system's decisions fall into place a little more easily.”
